Page 2903 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 August 2015
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Accountable practices. So you stick to the rules; you stick to the laws. You do not just change them on the fly. They said:
The … Parliamentary Agreement … commits to pursue measures which will ensure …
(c) Higher standards of accountability, transparency and responsibility in the conduct of all public business;
(d) Effective and responsible use of the forum of the Legislative Assembly …
I bet you that when Meredith Hunter wrote that to Shane Rattenbury she did not envisage that a number of years later this dodgy process would be in place here so that all of this green space could be turned over to development at the University of Canberra. I bet that was not in her mind.
Mr Smyth: Where Meredith is.
MR HANSON: Maybe she was involved in the process; I do not know. But I cannot imagine that was the holier than thou intent that we heard from Mr Rattenbury back in his day, from Meredith Hunter back in her day, and certainly from Simon Corbell when Simon Corbell was the champion of referendums to entrench this sort of stuff.
This is a man who in 2001 was so concerned that he wanted changes like this to be subject to a referendum—a two-thirds vote in the Assembly, entrenched. That is what he wanted back then. Now what does he want? He wants to bend the rules, change the rules, use the powers of the numbers in the Assembly so that he can ride roughshod over the community and treat a disallowable instrument with such disregard.
This is very poor process. There are significant concerns about the variations. We have articulated those and Mr Coe has articulated these in the Assembly before. But it seems that the very structures that are going to be created at the University of Canberra with retail, residential and commercial are exactly what Mr Rattenbury was railing against with Mr Snow out at the airport.
It seems that if it is all involving the Labor Party and the Greens—Mr Lamont might have been involved in this one; I do not know—we can stitch this together. It is great stuff that it is at the University of Canberra. But as Mr Rattenbury said in his speech, he was haranguing Mr Snow for doing it there. I would like to know the difference, except that probably Mr Snow had to go through planning processes that were not quite as dodgy as we are seeing here in the Legislative Assembly today.
I say it is hypocrisy. This is hypocrisy from those opposite, who say one thing, who get on their moral high horse about planning and other things, and when it comes to the reality are only too eager to circumvent the rules, to bend the rules, to change the rules, for their own purposes and to the detriment of our community.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Health, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Capital Metro) (5.06), in
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